


the recurring visitor

by allp_wips



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-06-02 05:31:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19434904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allp_wips/pseuds/allp_wips
Summary: When Alex nurses a mysterious alien's injuries one night, it leads to further meetings between them that change both their lives.





	the recurring visitor

It starts when Alex is walking home late one night, from her newly minted residency at the National City general hospital. 

She really should know better than to have her earphones in this late at night, but it had been a long double shift at the hospital, and her brain had shut down as soon as she had clocked out.

She’s only a block away from her apartment, when the man appears out of nowhere, causing Alex to step back. He looms threateningly, and Alex realizes with a quick look around that there’s no one else in sight. 

“Hey,” he says, walking towards her. “How’s it going?”

Alex doesn’t reply, stepping back further, trying to calculate how far she away she is from the apartment building that she’d just passed. If she could just make it to the door, she could run in and hopefully there’d be a guard running security and-

“What the hurry, lady?” he approaches closer. “Don’t wanna talk to me?”

Alex is trying to reach into her bag to reach her mace without trying to attract his attention her hands, when she sees something in his eyes change. They shift from his intense stare at her into something more predatory, and he rushes her.

Alex has her hands in front of her, shifting her balance - you don’t get to be the daughter of an FBI agent without learning some basic self-defense - when there’s a rush of air in front of her. She sees a blur of black and grey before her, hears the howls of pain from her would-be attacker, and hears the sickening crunch of bones breaking. Then, the man is stumbling back, hobbling away with one broken leg as fast as he can from Alex. Or rather, from the figure guarding Alex, that has now stumbled and fallen to the pavement in front of her.

By instinct, Alex rushes towards the figure.

“You didn’t have to-” she begins heatedly, when her breath catches.

Her would-be savior had not simply stumbled. She lies prone on the ground, and though almost the entire body is hidden in black fabric, Alex can see bruised and bloody lips tremble with every laboured exhale, through the small slit in the mask. When Alex sinks to her knees and creeps closer, touching the body, she can feel it shaking, as if it’s trying to come apart under her touch.

It’s obvious that it’s not the fight with the would-be attacker that has wounded this stranger so. She must have been on her way somewhere else, and witnessing this altercation, must have decided to step in.

Alex looks her over more carefully, fingers running over the torn uniform, and sees glints of green sticking out through the ripped suit, each shard of green ringed by bloody bruises.

_ Oh. _

Alex has heard of Kryptonians, mostly from the discourse in the media about them, and of course everyone knows about the Red-Blue Blur (or, at least, knows that he exists). The masked woman who seems to be dying in her arms looks nothing like the few pictures of him that had been taken in the media, and seems much older to boot than the teenager that he’s been rumoured to be. The laboured words that Alex makes out through her heavy breathing doesn’t shed any further light on who she is, either.

“Don’t... let them find me...”

Alex doesn’t know what “them” she means, the police or someone else, but she half-drags and half-carries the woman to her apartment. She lives in a dingy little apartment in the shady part of the city, where no one asks questions and everyone looks the other way, so she gets her into her living room with little comment.

She cuts away pieces of the torn up uniform, trying not to listen to the labored breathing from behind the mask, before using the finest of the tweezers in her kit to squeeze out the tiny shards of kryptonite embedded all over the bloody skin. The shrapnels are so many and so small, that the task takes her the better part of three hours. When she’s done, Alex is almost dead on her feet, having had to deal with this on top of a double shift at the hospital. She stays awake only long enough to drape the woman, whose wounds now seem to healing of their own accord - albeit slowly - over the armchair, before dragging herself to bed.

When she wakes up the next morning, the armchair is empty, and there’s a paper bag on her dining table, containing breakfast from the corner diner. No note stuck to it, nothing.

\---

It should have ended there, should have been the kind of story that Alex would tell her grandkids one day, that she’d met a Kryptonian, in the middle of the night, and helped her out, only for her to disappear by morning.

It doesn’t end there. 

A few months later, she’s more used to the residency, and settled in a marginally better calibre of apartment in a marginally safer part of town, when there’s a noise outside her balcony door. A familiar figure stumbles in, when Alex goes to check.

"You!" Alex says.

The Kryptonian's entire body seems to have been battered, but the right arm seems to have taken the biggest hit, bruised and bleeding all over, the suit ripped away at the shoulder. It’s this arm that the figure holds out to her mute appeal, while the other remains clenched at her side.

Alex leads her in without another second’s delay, not wasting time asking questions. She leads her to a seat at the kitchen table, for lack of anything more suitable, and rushes to her bedroom to get her medical kit. 

It’s kryptonite again, that much is clear from the look of it. Thankfully, this time it’s not broken shards of it all over the place. There’s just a clean wound in the arm where a green bullet had gone through, followed by slashes to the arm all over with what seem to have been regular knives.

Alex teases the bullet out with her tongue between her teeth and her heart hammering away through her chest, well aware that prolonged exposure is fatal. She has a million questions - Why has this women come here? How has she found her? What is she doing that gets her injured over and over again? - but nothing is more pressing that getting that bullet out.

She finally teases it out, rushing out of the apartment to disposed it down the garbage chute. When she’s back, the woman is stirring again. Alex can hear her gulping lungful of air, and she sinks back against her chair, the battered arm flopping down. 

“Stay still,” Alex mutters, crossing over. “You’re still bleeding.”

“It will heal,” the breathy reply comes back. 

“Still,” Alex mutters, a little put out. 

“Thank you.” The words are forced out through pale and still-trembling lips.

Alex purses her lips. “Who did this to you?”

Silence, this time.

“Fine,” Alex says. “Why did you come here?”

Still silence.

Alex gives a grunt of frustration, and goes to clean up her medical kit, figuring that maybe she’d get her to talk more after some recuperation. She’s by the kitchen sink, in the middle of disinfecting her tweezers, when she hears her balcony doors clatter open. 

By the time Alex returns to the living room, the suited stranger is, once more, gone.

\---

Except, she returns.

She comes back every couple of months, injured and bleeding in some form or another, mutely appealing to Alex to patch her up. Alex, despite managing to get no information out of the woman about what she’s up to, still does it, every single time. 

It continues for three years, even when Alex finishes up her residency and gets hired as a doctor at another hospital on the other side of the city. The masked vigilante still shows up at her newly rented apartment every couple of months, in need of looking to. She never pays Alex anything for these visits, and Alex doesn't ask either. But, every once in a while, there's something left on Alex's balcony. Some new appliance, or rare book, and once a whole brand new bike, right after her old Ducati had finally given up the ghost. Alex would refuse the gifts, if her mysterious Kryptonian stranger ever owned up to being the one leaving them, which she refuses to.

Alex can’t say she doesn’t like it, or the thrill of the odd connection that seems to have sprung up between her and the stranger.

\---

The thing is, Alex isn’t even sure if her sort-of-friend  _ is _ a vigilante. Unlike the Red-Blue blur in Metropolis, if her masked friend does any sort of vigilante work, she keeps it low profile, because not once does a word of anything about her cross the news channels. 

And yet, sometimes, when Alex is walking home, she hears a sudden out-of-place breeze, even on hot arid summer nights. As if someone had sped by very fast. Other than the visits for medical help, that’s the only thing that tips her off to the fact that the Kryptonian is up to something.

“It’s you isn’t it?” Alex asks her once, during yet another visit. “I heard something by the walls yesterday night when I was walking home, but there was nothing there, when I looked up.”

Her Kryptonian friend seems to have completely lost her powers this time around, rather than being weakened due to Kryptonite. Alex has heard rumours of this occasionally happening to the Red-Blue blur - whom the Daily Planet has finally christened last month as Superman - but it’s another thing to see it confirmed in front of her very eyes. The downside is that she has to tend to every single injury, instead of being assured that they would heal of their own accord.

“I wanted to make sure you got home unscathed,” is the reply she gets, now. “I haven’t forgotten the night we first met.”

“Oh.” Alex clears her throat, and glares fiercely down at the sutures she’s stitching. “Right.”

She should have said something then. Should have asked her out for a coffee, or a movie,  _ something.  _ They’ve known each other for three years at this point. The woman must like  _ something _ about Alex, if she keeps coming back.

But Alex just keeps working away, focusing on the wound that she’s stitching up, and doesn’t say anything. 

Next time, she tells herself, when she’s kicking herself afterwards for not saying anything. Next time, she won’t get hung up on insecurities and fears that her friend might not come back at all. Next time, she’d take a chance. 

\---

**_The next time_ **

She’s finished stitching the wound up, and is putting her tools away while the vigilante washes herself, when Alex speaks up.

“Why don’t you ever go to a hospital? Why do you always come to me?”

The vigilante pauses the movement of the white towel down her arm. “I don’t have the documentation to be admitted. Surely you must have realized by now what I am.”

Alex purses her lips, remembering the snips of news that she tries so hard to avoid. “Kryptonian. Right.”

She goes back to arranging her tools, well aware that the vigilante would notice that it’s taking her longer than necessary.

“It couldn’t be anyone but you,” the vigilante says, suddenly.

Alex’s hands still. “What?”

The words come low, but intense. “That night I met you... it felt like it was meant to be. Some part of me knew already, then, that I had to see you again. It couldn’t be anyone but you, not if a million hospitals were open to me.”

Alex swallows. She thinks her cheeks might be on fire, and her fingers tremble, when she finally turns down the latch of her kit.

“I was thinking,” she says, still looking down at the box. “I mean, there must still be a restaurant or coffee shop open this late, and you can’t have eaten dinner, and I have a bike, so-”

She trails off.

There’s a long silence, long enough for Alex to wish the ground would open up and swallow her, even though her apartment is ten stories up. The vigilante seems to have frozen up as soon her question had been processed, and it’s a while before she issues any reply, which is a stilted one.

“Doctor Danvers, I cannot.”

“It’s fine,” Alex croaks. “I get it.”

“It’s not what you assume-”

“ _ I get it _ ,” Alex repeats firmly, staving off any pitying remark which she knows will make her explode, whether into anger or tears she isn’t sure. “Same place, next time, you know the hours when I’m home.”

She gets off her stool, and waves her arm towards the window, using the pretense of putting her supplies away to keep from looking at the vigilante.

“Goodbye, Doctor Danvers.”

Despite her words, the vigilante seems to hesitate, bobbing from one heel to another as she stares at Alex, instead of leaving right away as usual.

“What?” Alex asks.

The other woman steps toward the window, before she seems to hesitate, and looks back.

“It’s not simply about me,” she says, retracing her steps back to Alex. “If I were to reveal myself, others would be put in danger too. My sister, for one, and my young niece.”

Alex swallows, and nods. 

“Ok.”

The vigilante seems to stare at her for a long time through the mask, before she sighs and turns away again.

Except, Alex grabs her arm, and turns her back around. She registers a sound of surprise from the woman, before she cradles a masked jaw with her hands, running her hands over the black fabric, wishing her touch could burn through to the skin underneath.

“Doctor Dan-”

Alex doesn’t let her finish, as she tiptoes up and aligns their lips together through the slight gap in the mask. 

There’s a soft gasp exhaled against her mouth at first, before the other woman starts responding. Alex uses her other arm to gather her in tighter, as the kiss intensifies, and wonders at how right this feels, when so much in her life has felt wrong, especially her forays into romance.

“Tell me your name,” she murmurs, when they separate. “It’s not fair that you know everything about me, and I know nothing at all about you.”

“Astra,” the name comes out in a shaky gasp. “It’s Astra. Oh, Alex, I shouldn’t have... it’s not... this can’t happen-”

“Why not?” Alex asks, registering that Astra’s hands are still on her shoulder, her thumb touching strands of her hair. “Do you really think I’m a danger to you?”

“No,” the strange strand of uncertainty is back in Astra’s normally stoic voice. “But, you know the danger in this country towards those like me, right now.”

“I’m not one of them,” Alex says fiercely. “I can protect you! I  _ do _ protect you.”

Astra subsides in her protest, though her heavy breathing suggests to Alex that her anxiety isn’t abated.

“Stay,” she whispers, having no real hope of getting the answer she wanted to.

And then, a miracle happens. Astra nods. 

\---

They kiss with a languid slowness, in no rush to move to anything further. It seems to Alex that they kiss for hours, Astra pressing her against the kitchen counter, before they even make it to her bedroom. 

When they do get there, Astra sheds her clothes with a careful grace that has Alex captivated. First the suit is zipped down, and stepped out of. Then the tank top is discarded, the undergarments following soon after. Astra takes her mask off last, and Alex can’t help but let out a sharp breath at the face that’s revealed to her. 

Astra is beautiful, in a strange otherworldly way that makes Alex want to shiver. 

“Alex, at the risk of sounding like one of your exhausting television dramas, I never do this.”

Vaguely, through the haze that had clouded her mind upon seeing Astra’s body, Alex realizes that this is the first visit in which she has called her by her name.

“Come here,” she says, her voice rough.

Astra does,walking over to sit by Alex on the bed, staring at her. Somehow, the woman whom Alex thought as fearless looks hesitant. Alex reaches out, tucking a silver-streaked strand of brown hair away behind her ear. Her thumb touches the shell of Astra’s ear in the movement, and she sees Astra swallow and close her eyes in response, volumes of longing communicated in that tiny gesture.

“Alex-”

“Come to bed,” Alex whispers, caressing her jaw, her fingers actually meeting skin for once. “It’s going to be okay.”

\---

When Alex has shed her clothes, and they navigate their way into her bed, they spend some moments simply gazing at each other, both shy in their newfound intimacy.

“I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” Astra finally whispers, staring up at her. “Every night, I’d think of... of telling you, hoping that I could, but-”

Alex stares down at her, flushing. “Oh.”

She isn’t the least discomfited by such a confession. She can’t say that she hasn’t dreamed sometimes - more than sometimes - of something happening between the two of them. Can’t say that she hasn’t wondered if it was fate that had led them to meet like that, and then drawn them to each other again and again.

“Is that strange?” The uncertainty enters Astra’s eyes again.

“No.” Alex quickly bends down to kiss her again, burrowing down closer against Astra’s body.

“It’s ok,” she whispers, in between soft kisses to Astra’s cheek and jawline. “It’s just for one night. We can figure the rest out after.”

Astra makes some garbled noises when the kisses land, her voice muffled into Alex’s hair, before finally replying with something coherent. “Alright. One night.”

“One night,” Alex echoes, as Astra strokes gentle arms down her back.

It’s supposed to be just one night, but she has a feeling neither of them are going to keep to that promise.

\---


End file.
